Early deal of the week: A 240GB SSD for $90

Our deal posts usually go up every Friday, but we have to make exceptions when juicy bargains pop up during the week. That's the case this week. TigerDirect currently has a PNY Optima 240GB solid-state drive on sale for $89.99 after a $20 mail-in rebate. The deal, TigerDirect says, expires today.

$89.99 for 240GB of storage works out to around 37 cents per gigabyte, which is awfully inexpensive. The drive itself isn't one we've reviewed, but it has good user ratings both at TigerDirect and at Newegg, which offers the same deal but doesn't have drives in stock. The guys at TweakTown tested this thing earlier this week, and they found it to be a solid performer. According to them, PNY uses a four-channel Silicon Motion controller with Micron NAND flash.

On the specs front, the PNY Optima 240GB is rated for read and write speeds of 512MB/s and 310MB/s, respectively, with 4K random IOPS of 60,000 for reads and 45,000 for writes. It has a 2.5" form factor and 7-mm thickness, and it comes with three years of warranty coverage. You have to register on PNY's website to get the full warranty, though; otherwise, coverage drops to a year.